


With Voices Ringing

by MlleMusketeer



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mild Series Finale Spoilers, Post War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:06:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/pseuds/MlleMusketeer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With a new future before him, Optimus revisits the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Voices Ringing

> _“From the table in the corner_
> 
> _They could see a world reborn_
> 
> _And they rose with voices ringing_
> 
> _And I can hear them now_
> 
> _The very words that they had sung_
> 
> _Became their last communion…_
> 
> _Oh, my friends, my friends don’t ask me,_
> 
> _What your sacrifice was for_
> 
> _Empty chairs at empty tables_
> 
> _Where my friends will sing no more.”_
> 
> _—“Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”, Les Miserables (Boublil and Schönberg)_

 

The building’s roof had been torn away by some millennia-old explosion, but the little back room still stood, many tables still standing, a few chairs toppled, as if their occupants had left in haste. 

Optimus stood in the light of one of Cybertron’s rare dawns, clear and bright, none of the muddy golds of an Earth sunrise, the sun gilding raw edges in silver and white. In the eons after Cybertron went dark, he had dreamed of standing again in such light, but now he did not lift his helm to look at it.

The dusty blackened little room was still much as it had been, and in his processor it was overlaid in memory, the cool flicker of the cheapest sort of lighting gleaming over scarred frames, from the carefully tended polish of the gladiators to the grimy plating of the miners, the tables cluttered with cubes of the cheapest high-grade, fields knocking and jostling in the tiny space, afire with excitement. 

One of the tables was ninety degrees off from where it would have been. Optimus moved forward and rearranged it, pulled a chair into the correct position and placed his palms flat on the surface, looking at the toppled chair at the head of the next table. There, Megatronus had sat, had overset the chair consistently when he rose in a passion, declaiming words of hope and fury. There, to the right, that had been Soundwave, and to the left, his own place. He did not go there, because even in this place, even at this time, there were ghosts he did not dare reawaken.

He named each mech and each place, and bowed his helm; most of them were dead, some even before the war began, before they took the title of Decepticons, before their revolution became corrupted. He stood there and remembered them as they had been, when all had been ideals and determination and the world laid out before them ready for the changing.

“We will preserve this place,” he said aloud, and his companion, a young femme, one of the very few sparked during the war, shuttered amazed optics at him. 

“But…” she started. 

The problems of peace were at times uglier than those of war. Many in power only remembered hatred, and Optimus found himself restraining them from enacting a vicious parody of justice upon any Cybertronian bearing a Decepticon insignia. There were only so many pardons he could insist on, only so many trials he could derail. Hideous things had been done during the war; he would not allow them to be continued in peace.

“We will preserve this place,” he said again, “because we must remember our history correctly if we are to avoid repeating it.”


End file.
